


Some Candy Talking

by phoebesmum



Category: Sports Night
Genre: Character Study, Divorce, Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-02
Updated: 2009-12-02
Packaged: 2017-10-04 02:35:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoebesmum/pseuds/phoebesmum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Talk about temptation …</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Candy Talking

**Author's Note:**

> Written May 2007. No prompts, no challenges, nothing. Dedicated to anyone who might want it.

Rebecca has a secret.

Nothing new there; who doesn't? Maybe you stole a lipstick when you were ten years old, cheated on a test, cried more when your old dog died than you did for your grandfather, told your mom you were sleeping over at a friend's house to cover for a date or a forbidden party: well, so what? Who hasn't?

Rebecca's secret is more banal and trivial even than that. All it is is this: she used to be fat.

Yes. It's not exactly headline news, is it? And, truthfully, _fat_ is overstating it. She wasn't huge, she wasn't gross, she wasn't morbidly obese. She was just podgy and unfit, enough so to be picked last for every team sport, enough so that the Popular Girls could use her as a target for their spite. Enough so to disappoint her parents; her grandparents even more: "Your mom was such a cutie when she was your age!" her grandma sighed, and dug out the old home movies to prove it, while Rebecca's mother rolled her eyes and simpered and said, "Oh, _Mom_!" but didn't, actually, seem displeased. Enough so that Ray and Andy told all their friends she was adopted and not their real sister at all.

They tried. Oh, how they tried. Her mom cooked her steamed chicken and endless, flavourless salads, she dragged her along to the gym with her, denied her snacks and cut her allowance to keep her from buying her own. Her dad reminded her that she'd want to be pretty for her wedding, pointed to her classmates as they left the school gate – "Now, _she_'s going to be really something in a few years, couldn't you try to be more like her?" – and bribed or bullied her brothers into including her in their ballgames.

None of it made any difference. Rebecca was fat – chubby, chunky, hefty, plump – and she stayed fat until the day after her fourteenth birthday, the day after the party that never happened because she didn't get a single RSVP to her invites, the day after she heard the Popular Girls giggling in the hallway – _Like we'd be seen dead, hanging with that fat lump!_ The day that something changed, and she decided she wasn't going to be _that fat lump_ any more.

Her dad was delighted; he gave her a dollar for every pound she lost, and promised a $100 bonus if she got down to 100 – "And we'll get your teeth sorted out, too," he offered, as an added incentive. Her mom, oddly, didn't seem so pleased; she almost snarled at the first person who complimented her on her pretty daughter, and complained bitterly at the need to buy new clothes. "You should learn to sew," she told Rebecca, "You could get two new outfits out of any one of your old ones."

Rebecca didn't care. Well: not much. And if she did, she never let it show. Bit by bit, she reinvented herself – though it was too late for high school, the Popular Girls made sure her old reputation carried over, and she never did get picked for sports (but she hated sports anyway). A thousand dollars' worth of cosmetic surgery meant her teeth were perfect, so even and straight and white they looked unreal, and for her 18th birthday her dad paid for a nose job, too. Her graduation gift to herself was to get her boobs shaped, and a weekend at a beauty spa taught her everything she needed to know about make-up and manicures, and turned her ratty, mousy, 80s-hangover perm into a sleek, smooth chestnut bob. She's everything now that the magazines tell a woman she should be. All that, and more, because Rebecca has brains, too; she always did. And now she has the looks, there should be nothing standing in her way.

But Rebecca has this secret: two secrets, actually. One of them – well, you know that, now. The other?

The other is that she goes to bed hungry every night of her life.

The urges never really go away. Sometimes, on the subway, she'll catch herself staring at a kid so intensely that its mother will put an arm around it and hustle it away, not knowing that it's not the child Rebecca cares about; she's doing all she can not to reach across and snatch the candy out of its hand. At dinner parties she's alienated god knows how many hostesses by making an excuse and leaving the table before dessert's served, but she knows one bite, one mouthful, would be her downfall. If she's out walking and runs across a patisserie, she'll cross the street rather than risk a glimpse into the window. She fantasises about cookies and cake and chocolate, they're her own personal porn, and sometimes she'll dream about food and wake up crying.

So maybe it was no wonder that she self-sabotaged, and she did it in the simplest, stupidest way possible: she married a man just like her father, and she let him know what her weak spot was. From that day forward, all he had to say to her was, "Are you okay, hon? Only you're looking a little bloated," to send her into a tailspin of panic. It took her a while – a little while, not long – to realise he did it deliberately, to punish her, to amuse himself; much, much longer to find the strength to confront him, and longer still to finally leave him. But she did. Leave him, that is. And now she's biding her time, licking her wounds, building up her strength, getting back on her feet.

The last thing she needs is Danny.

Danny. Talk about temptation. Danny is chocolate cake, no, Devil's Food Cake, dripping with frosting; he's toffee pecan cookies, jelly frosted doughnuts, mocha almond fudge ice cream, éclairs, pavlova, profiteroles – all the things, the forbidden things, that she craves so much and denies herself so fiercely. She hungers for him in the same way that she hungers at night for one extra mouthful, lying in her bed and feeling her stomach twist.

Although, truth to tell, when she thinks of Danny, it isn't her stomach that's causing the problems.

He was waiting for her this morning, same as yesterday and the day before, leaning up against the wall nonchalantly as if he just happened to be there. He smiled as she drew near, and she mustered up a pretty horrible scowl in return; he said, "Hey, Rebecca – " and, before he could launch into whatever variation on the theme he'd come up with today, she snapped her usual, "Not interested, Dan," and swept into the elevator.

She wonders why he never takes her at her word. Is it possible that there's hesitancy there, that she sounds unconvincing? Because she _does_ mean it. Oh, yes. In fact, you could argue that he's actually stalking her. She could put in a complaint. That'd get rid of him, once and for all. It wouldn't exactly look good on his resumé, either. Probably just the threat would be enough to see him gone.

She wonders why she doesn't do that.

There are flowers on her desk – again. A selection of early spring bulbs this time, planted in a green ceramic bowl. (Never cut flowers; never anything ordinary, no roses, no carnations. It's been orchids once or twice, once a mass of varicoloured chrysanthemums. Once it was violets; she longs to ask him, how did he know about the violets, or was it just a lucky guess, but … that would mean acknowledging the gift, not to say actually talking to him. Still, she can't help but wonder.) She stands and looks at them now, knowing she should just throw them away, knowing that she won't. It would be a waste, and the flowers, after all, are not to blame. She'll give them to Tara on the reception desk, that'll solve the problem.

The immediate problem. Nothing beyond that. There's only one way to solve that. The one way she can't quite bring herself to take.

All she has to do is say, "Dan, I'm sorry, but I'm still married," and she would never see him again. She knows this; she knows by instinct the sort of man he is. _Sweet_, Natalie had said he was, and _so kind_, and _lovely_. _Honourable_, she hadn't said, but if Rebecca were to ask her (she won't ask her), she would look puzzled and tell her yes, yes, he is, why do you ask?

But she doesn't tell him, and she daren't ask herself why; daren't admit that she would miss Dan, finds his persistence flattering, that she secretly longs to say 'yes' just to find out what would happen.

Maybe he wants her for all the wrong reasons; but at least he _wants_ her.

And the knowledge of that is enough, for now, to hold the emptiness at bay.

***


End file.
